Hi everyone, on the PBS news hour yesterday which for those of you who don’t know is USA based news program featured daily at16-30 hrs on SBS 1 there was a segment on Windfarms in Oregon. The disastrous news was that thousands of small bats were being killed by the wind turbines.Death was caused not only by the blades hitting the bats but the differential in air pressure caused by the turbines caused blood vessels in the bats to rupture.Not very green energy after all. the beautiful Hawkesbury 60km N/W of Sydney ============================== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) to: birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au
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If wind turbines are killing things, surely underwater turbines will too. But they would surely have the advantage that it would be much harder to tell.
Peter Shute
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Probably the best answer (at the moment) would be thorium-based reactors – very little waste materials plus they can burn up waste from previous uranium reactors. However, the coal and uranium mining interests here and abroad don’t like it as thorium is far more abundant than uranium and for the energy gained, it works out cheaper than coal. Not only that, they greatly reduce the chances of nuclear proliferation as you have to put a lot more work into one of those to get anything fissile enough to make weapons.I’m always amused by Australia’s horror of nuclear reactors, especially given the amount of uranium exported from here… Anyway (pet subject aside), I’d be right behind wind farms if they weren’t so good at killing off wildlife, same with tidal power – the previous UK government was going to press ahead with a scheme that could well have destroyed important marine areas in the Severn Estuary, just so they could provide heavily subsidised power to a small area through a tidal boom. Hopefully that plan has carked it and they might even replace it with underwater turbines in tidal channels, which are much less disruptive. Regarding the aesthetic value of wind farms, they do have a certain charm along the coast of southern Spain – they just a lack a moden-day Don Quixote to tilt at them… Cheers,
Tony
IF they are attracted to the insects! A more likely scenario is that they are attracted to what looks to them like a very big tree, which could host roosting sites or be a favoured mating site (eg butterflies on hilltops).
Cheers, Chris.
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Some research papers have been published in the last few months which demonstrate that significantly more insects are attracted to white and light-grey turbines than those that are darker in colour. So if bats are attracted to wind turbines to feed on these insects, they risk being killed by wind turbines (either from barotrauma or by being struck by a moving blade).
Stephen Ambrose Ryde NSW
Hi all
You could also argue that the bats most affected in the USA are tree-roosting bats. There are lots of those in Australia, and the Southern Bent-wing Bat is not one of them. The biggest danger is that bats are attracted to their deaths by wind turbines and there seems reason to think this is the case. Worryingly, no-one has any idea of the impact of bat kills at turbines in terms of overall population damage. You would like to think that the desire for turbines would have generated all sorts of knowledge about bat population sizes and migration routes, but overall it hasn’t.
If the turbines are being built where their production rate is marginal, that is even more of a worry, because then there is much more resistance to simple changes which might reduce the problem. It has long been known that bat kills can be greatly reduced if the turbines are shut down at low wind speeds, but that can have a significant impact on energy production and profitability at marginal sites.
I used to like seeing wind turbines, but now they have become a serious blight on the landscape in the USA and parts of Europe. You would like to think that at least the proliferation of them will do something meaningful for energy needs, but there seems considerable doubt about that, too. The community needs to be vigilant that there is a nett benefit to such projects, and that it understands the real pros and cons, not just from the viewpoint of those few with most to gain. Fat chance, I fear…
Cheers, Chris.
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Hi Keith,
I saw this too.
Unlike the US, however, not many of our bats migratory, which are the type of bats most impacted by wind turbines in that country. Therefore the anticipated impact is considered to be smaller on most species. An exception is the Southern Bent-wing Bat, which is the southern subspecies of the Common Bent-wing Bat and is considered critically endangered following sharp declines in its population size. This bat also migrates between summer maternity caves on coastal Victoria and SA to winter roosting caves on a regular, yet poorly understand, basis. In doing so they cross some prime wind farm prospecting territory in Victoria’s western districts. The impact of this is yet to be known. Indeed the impact of wind farms generally on bats is still poorly known given the size of microbats and, it seems, a lack of anticipation that they might be impacted–the science is catching up!
An issue to watch I reckon,
Stuart ________________________________________ href=”mailto:birding-aus-bounces@vicnet.net.au”>birding-aus-bounces@vicnet.net.au [birding-aus-bounces@vicnet.net.au] On Behalf Of Keith Brandwood [kbrandwood@bigpond.com] Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 10:50 AM
Hi everyone, on the PBS news hour yesterday which for those of you who don’t know is USA based news program featured daily at16-30 hrs on SBS 1 there was a segment on Windfarms in Oregon. The disastrous news was that thousands of small bats were being killed by the wind turbines.Death was caused not only by the blades hitting the bats but the differential in air pressure caused by the turbines caused blood vessels in the bats to rupture.Not very green energy after all. the beautiful Hawkesbury 60km N/W of Sydney ========== To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message: unsubscribe (in the body of the message, with no Subject line) href=”mailto:birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au”>birding-aus-request@vicnet.net.au
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Hi,
I Googled ‘baratrauma’ AND ‘bat/bats’ and got 60,900 hits.
Have a look.
Regards
Ralph Reid
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Hi Keith,
Yes, this impact on bats (known as barotraumas) has been known for a couple of years. I’ve pasted below an abstract of a scientific paper that documents this phenomenon.
Cheers, Stephen
Stephen Ambrose Ambrose Ecological Services Pty Ltd Ryde, NSW
Barotrauma is a significant cause of bat fatalities at wind turbines Erin F. Baerwald , Genevieve H. D’Amours, Brandon J. Klug and Robert M.R. Barclay
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB Canada T2N 1N4
Current Biology. Volume 18(16), August 2008: R695-R696
Abstract
Bird fatalities at some wind energy facilities around the world have been documented for decades, but the issue of bat fatalities at such facilities primarily involving migratory species during autumn migration has been raised relatively recently [1,2]. Given that echolocating bats detect moving objects better than stationary ones [3], their relatively high fatality rate is perplexing, and numerous explanations have been proposed [1]. The decompression hypothesis proposes that bats are killed by barotrauma caused by rapid air-pressure reduction near moving turbine blades [1,4,5]. Barotrauma involves tissue damage to air-containing structures caused by rapid or excessive pressure change; pulmonary barotrauma is lung damage due to expansion of air in the lungs that is not accommodated by exhalation. We report here the first evidence that barotrauma is the cause of death in a high proportion of bats found at wind energy facilities. We found that 90% of bat fatalities involved internal haemorrhaging consistent with barotrauma, and that direct contact with turbine blades only accounted for about half of the fatalities. Air pressure change at turbine blades is an undetectable hazard and helps explain high bat fatality rates. We suggest that one reason why there are fewer bird than bat fatalities is that the unique respiratory anatomy of birds is less susceptible to barotrauma than that of mammals.